Bruno Sousa
2010-Feb-23 23:08 UTC
[zfs-discuss] [storage-discuss] Horribly bad luck with Unified Storage 7210 - hardware or software?
Hi,
Just some comments on your situation , please take a look the following
things :
* Sometimes the hw looks the same, i''m talking specifically to the
SSD''s, but they can be somehow different and that may lead to
some
problems in the future . Bottom line is , don''t go too cheap for
production :)
* If you bought 3 7210 full of disks, they put pressure in your Sun
reseller to get some very cheap (i would say for free!) logzillas
. Their margin is more than okay to give you at least 1 logzilla
to your primary box .
* With ZFS always make sure you use a UPS attached to system and
make sure that you make a gracefull shutdown of the system in the
event of power failure and drained batteries on the UPS. If
possible use some sort of no-break system, like an auxiliary
generator or so.
* If possible don''t use any box whatsoever in production before 2
to
4 weeks of testing/pre-production . It''s quite often to see
problems when we stop to use benchmarks and start to use the
systems in production. Benchmarks i often called them "controlled
chaos", but based on my experiences in production there''s
only
"chaos", without the "controlled" part ;) . We never
now when some
application that *should* do some sequencial reads is actually
doing random reads...
* Don''t give up "easily" on the Sun support guys . Again
based on
my experiences, quite often you need to put pressure in your Sun
partner/reseller to get the necessary amount of attention to your
problem..please remember that money is what drives business .
* On your XEN, do you really LVM-over-iscsi? Can you live with NFS
storage repositorys in the XEN? In my current job, i never
achieved better performance with iscsi than what i have with NFS,
and NFS gives less issues..just take a look to the all snapshot
issues in Citrix Xen forums for people using ISCSI rather than NFS
. Also in a near-by future (i hope) pNFS will be there so,
therefore more and more performance for the NFS stack ;)
* Still on the XEN, i found that in my current environment enabling
jumbo frames in the xen physical servers leads to massive
problems..so if you can take a look to the jumbo frames support
for your specific network cards
* Getting out from the OS installed in your 7210, towards anything
else probably means that you will lose support from Sun..so i
don''t know if that''s such a good idea. Again, put
pressure in the
Sun reseller to get attention to your problem and don''t take
shortcuts and don''t get mad ;) I been there, i know the feeling
of
having to put something , expensive, to work and it just doesn''t
work as it should.
* Keep this list informed, they are great minds around here, so
maybe someone can give you some extra help
Good luck,
Bruno
On 23-2-2010 23:45, Nate Carlson wrote:> Hey all,
>
> I''ve put up a blog post on issues we''re having with 3
brand new Unified Storage 7210 arrays, available here:
>
> http://tinyurl.com/yeo9pft
>
> I''m curious if the symptoms (spurious halt, spurious vlan ipmp
group dropping, spurious reboots) that we are seeing are common for the X4540
machine, or if you think it''s likely to be a problem with the way Sun
rolls the Unified Storage software package.
>
> If it is a software issue, and we are unable to return these machines,
I''m considering running either OpenSolaris or NexentaStor on the
hardware.. hoping that it''s a software issue and not hardware. ;)
(Going OpenSol or Nexenta would also let us add our own SSD''s without
worrying about Sun complaining about it.. $400 for 32gb x25-e''s sounds
a lot better than $6k for an 18gb Logzilla!)
>
> Appreciate any thoughts!
>
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